As some of you may know by now, Eric Raymond has posted an
open letter to Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, pleading with Sun to open source the Java platform. A colleague of mine and I want to do something about this.

We are eXtreme Programmers to the core. Using his customer stories describing what he wants to do, I have started writing a simple J2EE app, using the Struts and Hibernate open source Java frameworks. At its most basic feature set, the user simply enters their email address and name on a web form, and after the user clicks submit, the app emails a copy of Eric Raymond's letter to Scott McNealy, James Gosling, and the Sun Microsystems Board of Directors.

We want to let Sun Microsystems, and Scott McNealy in particular, know in a very personal way, how many developers want Java to be open source.

We need your help. We do not have at the moment, reliable hosting that can take the possible beating of a Slashdotting. My simple Java app may not survive the onslaught on my personal home server. :-)

If anyone can provide Tomcat and MySQL hosting ASAP, I am willing to Paypal some money each month between now and the last day of OSCON 2004 in Portland. I want to hit Sun with a thousand emails of Eric's letter every day, between today and OSCON 2004.